ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

Two Poems
by David Sewell

A sniffling cadence
The age of anchovies came down on us like a ton of anchovies or a train carrying that many anchovies. It was dark and difficult to discern much of anything, not even a hand in front of our faces. I suggested we remove all of our clothes to increase the odds of seeing something. Meanwhile, in our stomachs, milk was declaring itself no longer neutral. We weren’t a cow, but we had big mouths and big theories and little parts in invisible plays. My mother agreed that your head was quite round. Often then, one thing led to another. The lack of parataxis, while resulting in perhaps too many cigarette burns and unsanctioned use of the garden shed, at least saved us from having to buy a more voluminous dictionary. One day I stepped out of the past tense and said aloud, I’m fishing for trout, even though I was actually watching you wash your skin in the bathtub. For your birthday, I gave you a metaphor. You were a shrimping village on the coast of tomorrow; I was a student of the comma remembering, for mine, I’d been a homesick toaster burning unleavened donuts. Our love was difficult to understand. Someone unrelated to either of us pointed to a surfeit of unclear causality in the air, but his hair was at that moment unsure of itself. Speaking of samovars. And cauliflowers. And the taste of your navel. A bit too briny I thought, so you screamed at the ocean. Your assault was unfair but oh so cute. I sent the photograph to your first-grade teacher, who’d told you so traumatically that you would never amount to an elephant. Alas, our business venture foundered. No one thought it much of a novelty to swim with the plankton. It was sad when you joined up with the whaling fleet. I had gotten so used to our nights watching TV. My favorite program was the one during which you danced in front of the television set, invariably causing your pants to fall off. The days after you left I went often to the seashore to throw rocks at the seagulls and strut suggestively before the tourists. Even when the bus arrived on time I didn’t stop thinking of you. No one could punctuate my sentences like you could. Dearest Mademoiselle Mastodon, ever since the day I watched your ship disappear into the cloud shaped like a tornado, I haven’t been able to dot even one exclamation point without unraveling at least a little bit.

Never better

My favorite preparation of eggs was from the concavity of your abdomen with the loons screaming in the moat below. It was nice having a moat, though the upkeep was dear. All day at work, as my knife removed the heads from parfrozen codfish, I liked to think of you safe at home, feeding the loons scraps of toast or whatever you did with your long afternoons. I suspected you were writing a novel in Russian, but I couldn't speak or read Russian so never was able to know for sure. Every morning after the chicken died we'd lick each other's skin to receive our daily requirement of sodium. There I go again, telling you things you already know. What I never told you was that I didn't particularly like the soup you made with the cod heads I secreted from the factory in the breast pocket of my seersucker jacket. Never did I say the washing machine's suffering an acute case of conflagration. Then again, we didn't have one. Alas, there never was any hope of removing the bloodstain from my jacket. Imagine my surprise when you told me I'd never worked in a fish factory, that I'd never brought you anything in my breast pocket, least of all a fish head. I took all this in in the dressing room mirror. The stain was still there. My hair was not. You I couldn't find everywhere. Though I often was hungry then, it was pleasant to sit quietly with the sun on my face, peering out over the stammering moat, remembering how buoyant you looked the first time you capsized the boat.